Time Travel for Photographers

By Andrew Dickson

Jan. 26, 2018

AMSTERDAM — At first glance, the pictures look like something recovered from the bottom of a Dumpster. They are pitted and scuffed, covered with rust spots that resemble blooms of algae or craters on the surface of the moon. Only close up can you glimpse an image of a city, almost too murky to see: the outlines of an apartment building, a scattering of roofs and chimneys. Whatever was originally depicted has left only the ghostliest of imprints.

Innovative though daguerreotypes were, they were also doomed: Printed laboriously on silver-coated copper, they were quickly overtaken by cheaper and simpler techniques. Daguerre’s triptych ended up in a regional museum, where it rusted into near oblivion. Ms. Ballhause’s reproduction doesn’t so much bring these images back to life as remind us of their lingering and painful death.

It’s strange to see a 19th-century Frenchman’s work on the walls of Foam, the Netherlands’ most fashionable contemporary photography gallery, and the new exhibition here springs plenty more surprises. There are recent prints developed with the use of moonlight, alongside Victorian images of celestial bodies. Another display places plant photographs by the early-20th-century artist and botanist Karl Blossfeldt next to a 3D-printed aluminum-and-resin sculpture based on their contours. The room next door contains sepia-tinted emojis printed onto animal hides.

Entitled “Back to the Future,” the show invites viewers on a journey of photographic time travel, one of its curators, Kim Knoppers, explained: from the cutting-edge of contemporary practice to 19th-century photography, before boomeranging back again. Around half the 25 or so photographers featured are long dead, but Ms. Knoppers and her co-curator, Ann-Christin Bertrand, of Berlin’s C/O photography gallery, where the show will travel later this year, have placed them alongside images by living artists who have attempted to master neglected and old-fashioned techniques.

In place of the iPhone snaps and Instagram feeds that have become de rigueur in contemporary art galleries, there are “heliographs” made using sunlight; hand-prepared glass negatives; and “cyanotypes,” produced with the same technique as the cobalt-colored blueprints used by 19th-century engineers. Although the oldest work in the show dates back to around 1853 — an iridescent cyanotype of a fern captured by the groundbreaking Victorian photographer Anna Atkins — the newest are just a few weeks old.

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“Ferns I,” a photographic collage from around 1928.CreditKarl Blossfeldt Archive

The idea originated a couple of years ago, when she observed how many younger photographers were rejecting the digital cameras and Photoshop they had grown up with in favor of analog, artisanal techniques, steeped in mystery and chance — the photographic equivalent, perhaps, of slow food or a fetish for turntables and vinyl.

“Maybe they are a little bit fed up with digital, this hyperinflation of images everywhere,” Ms. Knoppers said. “The original photographers came up with these amazing experiments,” she added. “It’s so inspiring.”

It’s a cliché to observe that photography is changing faster than ever before, but this is as nothing to 180 years ago, when the medium was in its infancy and experimentation was the order of the day. Even before Daguerre had perfected the daguerreotype in the late 1830s, the British amateur chemist William Henry Fox Talbot had successfully coated paper in light-sensitive solutions of sodium chloride and silver nitrate, the process that gave birth to the modern negative. By the early 1840s, Fox Talbot had drastically shortened exposure times, making it possible to photograph humans without blurred results. Within a decade, others were experimenting with “stereographs” (two pictures viewed through a lens that gave an impression of three dimensions), easy-to-develop glass negatives, cheap albumin prints — even color.

Some of the newest works in the show are by the L.A.-based photographer Matthew Brandt, who has become known for images of American lakes and rivers; his conceit is that the prints are developed using water from the sources he depicts.

Mr. Brandt’s recent work, “Waterfalls,” portrays a concrete dam near Flint, Mich., which became notorious in 2014 when contaminated water was introduced into the city’s drinking supply. Mr. Brandt photographed the dam in 2016, and also collected samples of river water, which he bottled and brought back to his studio. Once the images were printed, he ran the water over the prints using a pump, sometimes for weeks at a time; the liquid ate into the image surface, leaving toxic-looking spills of magenta, cyan, orange, and green. The pictures seem to make invisible poisons visible.

“I’ve always been into the labor-intensive nature of photography,” Mr. Brandt explained. “With digital, it’s all zeros and ones; chemical photography is becoming obsolete. But that’s why I like it. I like the pathos of it.”

Thirty-five miles from Amsterdam, in the city of Utrecht, the Dutch artists Jaya Pelupessy and Felix van Dam, two more contributors to the Foam exhibition, were putting the finishing touches to their latest project. I found them in Mr. Pelupessy’s studio — a large, concrete-floored space jumbled with books, prints, and photographic apparatus, and flooded with cool northern European light.

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Felix Van Dam, left, and Jaya Pelupessy in their studio in Utrecht, the Netherlands.CreditMarcel Wogram for The New York Times

On one side of the room was a bulky, ungainly bellows camera on a tripod: a homemade contraption that the artists, like Victorian photographic amateurs, had built to their own specification. Using this kit, they produce silkscreen prints of household objects that resemble blocky, bitmap computer graphics.

The process involves hand-coating mesh screens in UV-sensitive emulsion and exposing them to light, which creates an image that can be printed by hand. Shutter speeds are in the vicinity of 40 minutes, with color filters used to add different tints.

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Mr. Pelupessy and Mr. Van Dam developed a new technique with a large-format camera that combines photography and silkscreen printing.CreditMarcel Wogram for The New York Times

“One image takes days of work,” Mr. Pelupessy, 28, said, adding that it had made him understand the work of pioneers like Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins with fresh respect. “When we started the project, everyone we talked to said, ‘Why?’ ”

But the appeal was irresistible, he said. Instead of hitting a digital shutter, he and Mr. van Dam spent hour after hour building up images, layer by painstaking layer — playing with light, shade, and form like the men and women who created photography, never quite knowing what would result.

After all, Mr. Pelupessy reflected, the word “photography” literally means “drawing with light.” “There’s something magical in the process,” he said. “These techniques are old, but they’re also new. They still surprise us.”